Prophet

by Frank Peretti

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, she went back there and talked to a counselor about all this, and the counselor called her back today. It turns out that one of the girls who’s been coming to her for counseling says she was on that van with Annie.”

  John’s pulse was quickening. “So . . . all right, what’s this girl willing to do?”

  “The counselor said—now I’m getting this from Rachel, I haven’t talked to the counselor yet—the counselor said that this girl might talk to Annie’s mom, but she doesn’t want anyone to know who she is or even to see her, and the counselor has to be there.”

  “What about a reporter? I wonder if she’d mind a woman reporter being there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find out. Get on it.”

  “Okay. I’ll get right back to Rachel and then call Deanne. But I don’t know how this thing’s going to turn out.”

  “Thanks, Carl. Good work.”

  “I love it.”

  They hung up, and John looked around the room for Leslie Albright. She’d be perfect for this, if it ever developed.

  What was it Carl said? “I love it” or “I love you”?

  CHAPTER 13

  THAT SATURDAY LESLIE Albright picked up Deanne Brewer, and they drove together to a small, storefront location between a laundromat and a used bookstore just off Morris Avenue, an obviously low-budget operation in a low-rent building in a run-down district. If Leslie had not called first and gotten clear directions, they may have had trouble even finding the place. It was Deanne who first spotted the posterboard sign in the window: “Human Life Services. Free Pregnancy Tests, Counseling, Referrals, Support Services. Abortion Alternatives.”

  Leslie parked just across the street, turned off the engine, and then looked at Deanne. “Well, are you ready for this?”

  Deanne was uneasy but gave a firm nod. “Oh, I’m ready. I know I’m not going to like it, but I’m ready.”

  They got out.

  “Better be sure you lock it,” Deanne said.

  They locked the doors and crossed the street. Leslie was here as a friend, not a reporter. She was on her own time, with no plans as yet to make a news story out of this. She was here just to listen, to get the facts for John since he couldn’t participate. Since she felt she owed him some favors, she’d let him talk her into it. Besides, at the very worst it would be a chance to see a side of the issue she’d never really seen before.

  And she’d never taken a close look at anything like this place before either, this humble little enterprise with the pretty curtains in the weathered windows and the simple painted sign to identify the place. While doctors could make over a thousand dollars per day in large, abortion-providing clinics with paid staffs, here was an organization mostly run by volunteers and operating on donations. She was impressed by how unimpressive it was.

  Marilyn Westfall, the director, was waiting for them and met them at the door, introducing herself. She was a lady somewhere in her forties or fifties, professional in her demeanor, and soft-spoken, especially now. “Please come in and have a seat. We’ll talk for a bit.”

  They stepped inside without speaking, careful not to make any noise, as if a baby were sleeping somewhere. The reception area provided a small table with coffee and cups, four padded chairs, and a coffee table with literature—obviously pro-life—arranged on it. Deanne and Leslie sat down on one side of the table, and Marilyn sat across from them.

  Mrs. Westfall explained in a quiet voice, “The young lady you’ll be talking to is waiting in a counseling room. For our purposes today we’ll give her a pseudonym; we’ll call her Mary. I told her I would speak with you first so we could all understand and agree on the conditions for this visit.

  “Just to give you some background, I’m a licensed counselor, married, with two grown children, and I donate my time here twice a week. Mary came to us about a month and a half ago, post-abortive—psychologically distressed from the abortion experience—and I’ve been working with her on a regular basis.

  “Now you can call it coincidence—I think God had something to do with it—but just a few weeks ago she told me about a particular struggle she was having.” Mrs. Westfall spoke carefully, slowly. “She’d been living with the knowledge that your daughter, Mrs. Brewer, was there at the clinic at the same time she was and possibly could have died from the abortion she received.”

  Deanne only nodded, expecting this.

  Mrs. Westfall continued, “Well, she told me about this in confidence, so I couldn’t take any further steps until Mary was ready to do so herself. But then, right about the same time, Rachel Franklin came to us—and I understand Rachel’s already told you about that.”

  Leslie nodded. “That’s right.”

  “So you recall that while she was here she read some of our literature and pieced together her theory that Annie died from a septic abortion. She later shared that with me. Well, that put me in a bind. Two girls coming to the same conclusion at practically the same time, and here I was in the middle, unable to tell either about the other . . . until this week. I understand Rachel had told your friend . . . uh . . . Carl?”

  “Yes, Carl Barrett, and his father, John Barrett.”

  “Mm-hm. She told Carl and his father about her theory, and then Rachel came back to me and said they wanted to talk to someone who’d actually been there and seen Annie getting the abortion . . .” Mrs. Westfall allowed herself a muffled laugh. “Isn’t it amazing how God works? I shared all this with Mary, and she said she’d like to tell what happened, but only to you, Mrs. Brewer, and I agreed that she should. So here we are.

  “Now, this might seem a little strange to you, but here is how she wants the interview done: she’s going to be inside the counseling room, and I’ve moved a screen in there for her to sit behind because she doesn’t want anyone to see her; she doesn’t want anyone to know who she is. I told her you were going to bring a friend along, Mrs. Brewer, someone to give you support, and that’s fine with her, because I’ll be there giving Mary support, so she’ll have someone and you’ll have someone.

  “Now as we discussed over the phone, Mary does not want to be tape recorded, but if you’d like to jot down any notes about times and places, that’s fine. She wants you to know what happened; she’s just very concerned about protecting her privacy.”

  “We understand,” said Leslie.

  “So what we’ll do is go down the hall to the counseling room, and I’ve arranged two chairs in there for you, on this side of the screen. We’ll go in, get you seated, and then I’ll go behind the screen to be with Mary. All right?”

  They rose, and Mrs. Westfall led the way to the counseling room, passing a tight little office with a telephone, desk, copy machine, and literature, and then a large room filled with maternity clothes, baby clothes, toys, and folded cribs.

  The last door on the right was the counseling room. Mrs. Westfall knocked lightly, said “Hello, we’re here,” and opened the door. Quietly, as if approaching a timid deer, Leslie and Deanne went into the room and sat in the two chairs on the near side of a collapsible screen. Then Mrs. Westfall went behind the screen, out of sight.

  “Mary,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Deanne Brewer, Annie’s mother.”

  There was no response from behind the screen, so Deanne ventured a gentle “Hello, Mary.”

  “Hello,” came a young woman’s voice.

  “And Mrs. Brewer has a friend with her, Leslie Albright.”

  “Hello,” Mary said first.

  “Hello, Mary.”

  Mrs. Westfall said, “Mary, why don’t you just tell Mrs. Brewer what happened, what you know, and then, if it’s all right with you, perhaps Mrs. Brewer or her friend Leslie would like to ask you some questions. You don’t have to answer any question you’re uncomfortable with, all right?”

  “All right.” Then there was an awkward pause. They could hear the girl fidgeting, not knowing what to say.

  Mrs. Westfall help
ed with, “You were a classmate of Annie’s, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . . well, why don’t you tell them how you found out you were pregnant?”

  “Mrs. Hannah told me.”

  “And Mrs. Hannah is . . . ?”

  “The nurse at school, at Jefferson.”

  Leslie got out her notepad and started jotting down the details.

  “And when was this?”

  “Last year.”

  “In May?”

  “Yeah, it was on a Tuesday.” It sounded like Mrs. Westfall was looking at a calendar somewhere. “That would be . . . May 21st, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Tell us about that.”

  “I thought I was pregnant, and so I went to see Mrs. Hannah, and she gave me a pregnancy test, and the test came out positive, and she asked me when my last period was and figured out I was about seven weeks pregnant.”

  “And how did you feel about that?”

  “I was scared. I didn’t know what to do. But the first thing Mrs. Hannah said was, I didn’t have to tell my parents. She said nobody had to know and we could get me an abortion right away and nobody would have to find out about it.”

  “And what about the father? Did he know?”

  “No. I never told him. I don’t even talk to him anymore. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.”

  “So . . . Mrs. Hannah told you you could get an abortion right away and that your parents wouldn’t have to know . . .”

  “Yeah. And then she asked me if I had some money to pay for it, and I said no, but she said that was okay because she could file for state assistance and the state would pay for it, no questions asked. Mrs. Hannah had the forms right there in the office. So I never had to pay any money, and I think the clinic got paid a few months later, but they’re set up for that. Anyway, she set up an appointment for Friday and told me there’d be some other girls going.”

  Deanne’s eyes began filling with tears.

  “So,” Mrs. Westfall prompted, “did you go to school on Friday?”

  “For the morning. And then, instead of having lunch, I went to Mrs. Hannah’s office, and then me and two other girls got on this van that came from the clinic and they took us over there and we got our abortions.”

  Leslie asked, “And that was the Women’s Medical Center?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mrs. Westfall prompted, “And you knew the other two girls?”

  “Yeah. One of them was Annie.”

  Deanne tried not to make a sound, but she couldn’t keep from crying.

  Mrs. Westfall asked, “Are you all right, Mrs. Brewer?”

  Deanne could hardly answer. “I’m all right. I want to hear it.”

  “We can stop for a moment.”

  “No . . . no, I want to hear it. I have to hear it.”

  Leslie took Deanne’s hand, and Deanne received her comfort.

  “Go ahead . . . please,” Deanne said.

  Mrs. Westfall asked Mary, “This is one of the big, important questions, Mary. Did you see Annie receive an abortion at the Women’s Medical Center?”

  “Not the whole thing.”

  “Well, tell us what happened.”

  “Well, the van took us there, and we went in and they had us fill out some forms—stuff about diseases we’ve had or drugs we were taking or allergies . . .”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Westfall, “medical history, I suppose.”

  “Yeah. And then there was a consent form that said we agreed to have the abortion and we were aware of the risks.”

  “Did you read the form before you signed it?”

  “I didn’t understand it, and I didn’t have time. Everybody was in a hurry. A bunch of other women and girls were there, and it just seemed like everybody was in a hurry. But there were some girls in the waiting room before us. They were already there when we got there, and they went first, and then . . . um . . . the other girl . . .”

  “The one who wasn’t Annie?”

  “Yeah. A counselor came and got her, and she went first . . .”

  “What do you mean when you say a ‘counselor’?”

  “Well, they had some women there who kind of took you through the whole thing. They answered your questions and tried to make you feel relaxed, things like that.”

  “All right.”

  “So then my counselor took me into one room, and when I was in there sitting on the table I could see Annie through the doorway, out in the hall with another counselor. They were going to put her in the room across the hall, and I remember her saying . . . well, I don’t want to say the other girl’s name, but see, the other girl was done, she was on her way to the recovery room, and Annie was talking to her, asking her how she was, and I remember Annie sounded scared.”

  Mrs. Westfall asked, “Could you hear the other girl’s voice at all?”

  “No, not from where I was. My counselor and some other lady . . . maybe it was a nurse, but she didn’t look like one . . . were talking and I couldn’t hear. But I heard Annie say to the other girl, ‘Are you all right?’ and then somebody out in the hall with her, one of the counselors, told her, ‘She’s all right, just come in here,’ and then the doctor came into my room, and they closed the door, and he started doing the abortion on me and . . .”

  They could tell Mary was crying.

  “And . . .” Mary struggled to speak. “And it just hurt so much . . . and I told the counselor, ‘What’s he doing, you said it wouldn’t hurt,’ and she just held me down, and I started screaming, I couldn’t help it, and the doctor yelled at me to hold still and he said, ‘You want your parents to find out?’ So I tried to keep quiet, but then I heard Annie screaming . . .”

  Mary broke down completely.

  Deanne also broke into bitter weeping, and Leslie embraced her.

  THAT EVENING, TROUBLED and torn with emotion, Leslie reported her findings to John, Carl, and Mom Barrett around the Barrett dining table, referring to her notes.

  “From the way Mary described it, the doctors were in a hurry, rushing it, not gentle but cold and insensitive. Apparently Mary got through it without serious physical injury, but . . .”

  “But Annie wasn’t so lucky,” said John.

  “No,” Leslie agreed. “She wasn’t so lucky. I guess Friday is a busy day for them. According to Mrs. Westfall, the clinic runs a van to three different schools—Jefferson High, Monroe Junior High, and Gronfield Junior High—to handle the girls who can’t supply their own transportation. They do all their school referrals on Fridays and Saturdays so the girls can recover over the weekend and not miss school and hopefully get around their parents finding out.”

  Mom asked, “You mean the schools send the girls over there?”

  Leslie nodded. “The clinic gives a discount if any girl is referred by a school counselor. This is a business we’re talking about, involving a lot of money. We’re talking about fifty abortions per day for a price of $350 each, many of them paid for by state funds and the others paid for with cash or credit card only, in advance, with virtually no paper trail, no regulation, no accountability. There is room for corruption. But be that as it may . . .” Leslie eyed her notes again. “This particular day must have been hectic—like I said, on a good day the clinic will do up to fifty abortions—and Mary says the abortion was very painful and, she thought, rushed, and she was in a lot of pain afterward. The girls spent about a half hour in the recovery room, and since there didn’t seem to be any major problems they were given a sheet of follow-up instructions and a month’s worth of birth control pills and taken out to the van. Mary says she was in a lot of pain, with a lot of bleeding, which eventually stopped. As for Annie, she had to be helped, practically carried, back to the van. They were taken out the back door of the clinic—so they wouldn’t be seen, according to Mary—and then taken back to the school where they spent the rest of the school day, which would have been an hour or so, in the nurse’s office, lying on beds and
recovering.”

  Carl added, “And the school records just marked them as being in school, not absent for that day.”

  John responded, “So it was a good thing we checked with the teachers first.”

  “Sly move.” Carl looked at his notes. “Mr. Pomeroy marked her absent from U.S. Government, fifth period, and . . . Mrs. Chase marked her absent from Art, sixth period. Deanne heard from three of Annie’s other teachers who taught morning classes, and they marked her present. So it matches what Mary said.”

  John looked at Carl’s notes. “Gone for half the day, and her parents none the wiser. How’s that for a new interpretation of in loco parentis?”

  “Well,” said Leslie, “it all has to do with privacy.”

  “Yeah,” said Carl, “so Annie died privately when she could have lived publicly.”

  Leslie didn’t argue with that. “Granted.”

  “All that aside,” John interjected, “this whole thing raises some serious questions. How many women go through that place every week? How many minors? And what do we even know about the doctors, the staff, the hygienic standards?”

  “Virtually nothing, and that’s my concern,” said Leslie. “As far as we know, over four thousand abortions are safely performed in this country every day, and we’re simply dealing with an anomaly—one very bad apple. But how do we know that for sure? How many other bad apples are out there? How can we find out? Besides, one is one too many. Listen, whatever Marilyn Westfall knows, she’s pieced together by talking to people who’ve either had abortions at that clinic or who have worked there. But it is in little pieces, none of it is provable, and just try finding something out directly. The clinic can hide behind the reproductive privacy laws and never have to come out.”

  Mom shook her head. “Well, don’t blame me. I didn’t vote for those laws—and I didn’t vote for Hiram Slater.”

  Leslie admitted, “I voted for both.”

  John ventured, “You sound like you regret it.”

  Leslie gave a wry smile. “I’m watching and listening—let’s just put it that way.”